Dear Members

As I write this we have just one month to go before the largest event we organise each year, our Annual Conference. This year, as we celebrate 25 year of ALT, there is much to look forward to and this report covers some of the key developments across the Association.

Your voice #altc #altc25

First, I wanted to draw your attention to an ongoing project from ALT’s President, Prof Martin Weller, who has been blogging about the 25 Years of EdTech in this series of posts, counting down to 2018! Members have also started writing posts for publication on the #altc blog and we are inviting contributions tagged #altc #altc25 to add to this growing collection of voices and views from across our membership.

Vote for your choice in the Learning Technologist of the Year Awards 2018

As many of year will be aware, we have launched a new category of Award this year, celebrating outstanding achievements in research in Learning Technology. The judging panel, has reviewed, short-listed and interviewed this year’s entries and after careful deliberation the panel has selected the finalists. Now it’s up to you to vote for your choice for 2018 Community Choice Award. There can only be 1 winner, so you select your front runner from all individual, team and research project entries. Good luck, everyone!

Conference preparations

With over 100 Members involved in the preparations for this year’s event, we look forward to welcoming as many of you as possible in Manchester and online. Alongside our Members who work hard to review papers, shape the social programme and chair sessions, we are particularly grateful for the support from our sponsors this year: Catalyst, VScene, Blackboard, MeeToo, RMResults and UNIwise.

The Trustees of ALT have also made funds available to support 10 participants to come to the conference in memory of ALT’s former President, Doug Gowan, enabling those otherwise unable to attend to contribute and have a voice at the conference.

With 140+ sessions, the programme this year includes research sessions, poster presentations, workshops and many short presentations.

Changes to ALT’s Constitution

At this year’s Annual General Meeting on 12 September Members will be voting on a resolution to adopt an updated version of ALT’s constitution. We will write to all Members to set out the proposed changes in more detail when the papers for the AGM are distributed, but the main changes to the constitution are to ensure ALT’s governance has more long term stability and is in line with best practice recommended by the Charity Commission. Thus the terms of service for the Vice-Chair, Chair and President of ALT, which currently are limited to 1 year and rotate annually, will be brought in line with the terms served by Trustees overall under the update constitution.

Staff team

As our activities are growing and in particular the CMALT scheme is now being developed to offer new accreditation pathways to Associate and Senior CMALT, we also require more staffing resource and we have just welcomed Susan Greig as ALT’s new Operations Manager. Susan will support ALT’s operations including taking on the overall management of the CMALT scheme and related CPD activities, work with Special Interest Group and enhance communications.

As senior staff Martin Hawksey and I continue to share our experiences of transitioning ALT’s operations to a fully distributed, virtual model of operations and we have now published 6 monthly blog posts and a podcast in this series on open leadership ‘Sharing our approach to leading a virtual team’.

A note of thanks #CMALT

I’d like to end my report with a note of thanks to all who have contributed to the CMALT consultations. As well as informing the development of the new Associate and Senior CMALT pathways, Certified Members led a ‘visual thinkery’ conversation with Bryan Mathers, resulting in these new visuals for the principles of ALT’s accreditation scheme. Thank you to everyone involved.

session 2 – principles of CMALT

We will be holding the first CMALT Ceremony as part of the AGM on 12th September to further enhance the recognition of the scheme. If you have been accredited or updated your portfolio in the past year, we look forward to congratulating you in Manchester.